So, along with thinking of things like Learning Kanji without Kanji, I’ve been thinking of other things related to learning strategic vocabulary sets that make it easier to learn kanji later. I’ve thought often about learning a set of 2,100 or so words (many of which, really, may already covered in begginner Japanese lessons), one per kanji, so that you have at least one reading already under your belt for each kanji to learn. That gives you an “in” to become familiar/comfortable with the characters, which is a good starting point for learning the remaining common readings and meanings for the characters.

But it occurred to me the other day, that you don’t even need 2,100 words. You can learn readings for kanji with fewer than one reading per kanji, thanks to the fact that many words can be written with more than one possible kanji (as we saw in Miru and Friends).

Using Jim Breen’s KANJIDIC and EDICT files, together with some processing scripts I wrote and a certain amount of manual labor, I’ve generated a file that tries to list a minimum number of vocabulary words (219), for a maximum coverage of kanji characters (562). Here’s a link to the version as of this writing, and here’s a link that tracks the latest version as it changes. It’s a plain text file in Unicode/UTF-8 encoding, and lists a Japanese word, followed by a list of the kanji characters that can be used (together with okurigana) to write the word, and then a list of dictionary definitions (from EDICT) for the word. In some cases, different characters used to write the word give different definitions in EDICT (but related: for instance, the verb “toru”/とる usually means “to take”, but when it’s written as 撮る, it specifically refers to “taking” a picture, so its definition reflects that). Words that are written the same in hiragana, but have unrelated meanings, aren’t grouped together.

The file is currently a bit rough. It was generated from a file that I’d generated some time back, and some of the choices for words may be strange. Many of the kanji are very rarely used for that reading (紅 for “akai”/あかい, which is usually written with 赤), though I’ve tried to pull out particularly rare ones. In many cases the meaning changes, subtly or significantly, when certain kanji are used. But I still think it’s a useful list for learning words that can be used later to learn kanji.

So, here’s the first article in my experimental series for Learning Kanji Without Kanji. See that article for an explanation of the motivations and approach.

According to the data I collected, the on’yomi (Chinese-origin kanji reading) that occurs most frequently, is じ. This doesn’t mean that it is used for the largest number of commonly-used kanji characters (that would be コウ), or that the kanji characters that use it are the very most commonly-used kanji characters (the most commonly-used character in books/novels is apparently 人, with on’yomi of じん or にん; in newspapers it is claimed to be 日 with にち or じつ); it means that, if you were to take a large sample of text (in my case, I used data taken from novels and books), and kept just the words that are made up entirely of on’yomi kanji readings, and replaced each character with just its reading, ignoring what the original character was, then じ would turn out to be the most common on’yomi found. From my set of ~2100 kanji characters I was taking into account, 23 of them use じ as at least one of their on’yomi (but we’ll only consider the meanings of the most common, as the less common ones probably happen rarely enough that they don’t immediately “pop” their meaning into the listener’s head).

Self

You may already be familiar with the word じぶん, meaning “oneself”. I use Facebook in Japanese-language mode; I see this word all the time there (as well as in other places). For instance, 「John Smithが じぶん の きんきょう に ついて コメント しました。」 “John Smith commented on his (own) status.”

There are also words like じどうしゃ (automobile/car; literally, “self-moving vehicle”) and じてんしゃ (bicycle, “self-revolving vehicle”); じどう can also be a word to itself meaning “automatic”, and is a fairly common prefix found in words of that sort; another example might be the word for “vending machine”: じどうはんばいき (“automatic sales machine”). Just keep in mind that the じ of じどう means “self”.

Aside from じぶん, the ジ sound is used in several other words that mean “self” or “oneself”, some of which have slightly different uses from each other, such as じしん, which is especially used to mean “on ones own initiative”, or “personally”. The Japanese Wikipedia rule against publishing articles about oneself is phrased, 「じぶん じしん の きじ つからない」. There’s also じこ, another word meaning “self”, which is another word that’s often used as a prefix; for example, じこしょうかい, “self-introduction”. Since the sound こ is also an on’yomi that can sometimes indicate “self”, じこ is one of those words that takes two sounds that can portray an overlapping meaning, and uses them together to express that meaning in unison. There are many examples of such words.

じしん was already mentioned as one of several words referring to “self” (especially “on one’s own initiative”), and it’s comprised of じ “self” + しん, “person”. But there’s another kanji character for しん, meaning “belief”, that is sometimes used for the word じしん; in these cases the word means “self-confidence” rather than “on one’s own initiative”. Context usually makes it clear which is meant.

(Note: as we’ll see later in this article, there’s another common meaning for じしん, “earthquake”. Japanese is frustratingly full of homonyms… fortunately context usually helps in discerning one of several possible meanings.)

Vocabulary

じぶん

oneself

じどうしゃ

automobile

じてんしゃ

bicycle

じどう

automatic

じしん

on one’s own initiative

じこ

self-

じこしょうかい

self-introduction

Matter or thing

This じ expresses the same idea as the common word こと (which is expressed by the same kanji character). You already know it from the words しょくじ (eat + thing = “meal”) and だいじ (big + thing = “important”). It also gives a flavor of “work”, as in こうじ (construction + work = “construction work”), and even じむしょ (work + employ + place = “office”). It also combines with じつ, “truth” (the same one from the sentence-starter じつは, “the truth is/actually…”) to form the word じじつ (thing + truth = “fact”).

Vocabulary

しょくじ

meal

だいじ

important

こうじ

construction work

じむしょ

office

じじつ

fact

Time

The great thing about starting with the most commonly-used on’yomi is that you’re probably already familiar with a lot of words that use it (the downside of course is that there are several alternate meanings expressed by the one sound).

Any beginning Japanese learner should be pretty familiar with the meaning of “time” for the sound じ. いちじ is one o’clock, さんじはん is half past three o’clock, じかん is one hour, and いちじかんはん are one and a half hours.

Vocabulary

いちじ

one o’clock

じかん

an hour

どうじ

(“same” + “time” = ) simultaneous; synchronized

じだい

(“time” + “period” = ) era.Example: めいじじだい, the Meiji era of Japanese history

Character/Letter

This one probably needs even less introduction than the “time” meaning. We can pretty much just skip to the example vocabulary.

The word じ can appear by itself to mean character. The word もじ is also used for the same meaning, when じ by itself is too ambiguous. The word もじれつ is the Japanese word for the computer programming concept of a character string.

Vocabulary

もじ

character

かんじ

kanji character

えいじ

(English) alphabetic letter

すうじ

(count + character = ) digit

もじれつ

character string (programming term)

Earth/Ground

At the time I’m writing this, the devastating March 11 earthquake happened only a month ago, so one of the sobering words one would be hearing a lot at this time is じしん, ground + quake = “earthquake”. Yes, we just saw two other じしんs (I said we’d see another one, didn’t I?). Japanese is a language where context is very important.

Another common word with this meaning for じ is じごく, ground + prison = “hell”. There is an anime series known as Hell Girl, for which the Japanese name is じごく しょうじょ (the second word means “little girl”).

There’s also いじ, which means “spirit” or “disposition”, and is formed of “mind/heart” + “ground”. It might be a little trickier to see the connection between this word and its components, but it helps somewhat to note that, unlike the wordlet き (as in きもち and きぶん, both of which refer to how one is feeling at the moment), いじ tends to refer more to one’s actual nature as a person, and not some fleeting mood. It’s not necessarily an unchangeable or permanent state, since you can say ともだち に いじわる を して は いけません, “Don’t be unkind to your friends” (いじわる is いじ + わるい, bad-spirited), which implies that you can change your disposition toward your friends; however, it’s frequently used to indicate something that’s a personality trait, as opposed to a passing condition.

(Note: we haven’t gotten to the sound ち yet, but this same idea of (and kanji for) “earth/ground” is often expressed as ち as well as じ; it’s the ち of ちず, earth + diagram = “map”).

Vocabulary

じしん

earthquake

じごく

hell

いじ

disposition

Baby/Child

じ can express the idea of “baby” or “child”. じどう is a word meaning “children’s” or “juvenile”, and is often used as a prefix. じどうぶんがく is “juvenile literature”. Note that we also saw another じどう earlier, meaning “automatic”, which was also used as a prefix for many words. But “juvenile literature” makes a little more sense than “automatic literature”, doesn’t it?

Vocabulary

じどう

juvenile, children’s ~

ようじ

baby, infant

こじ

orphan (also: tiger cub)

たいじ

fetus

Show/Express/Display

The last meaning for じ that we’ll look at here has a primary meaning of show or express.

Another common word, ひょうじ, combines two sounds that both can mean “to express or display”; another word that clarifies one of several possible meanings by reinforcing it. 「がめん に ひょうじ された イメージ」, “The image displayed on the screen.”

A credible reason for why learning new kanji is generally a much easier proposition for native Japanese, has been rolling around in my head for a while.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, when a Westerner encounters an unfamiliar kanji character, there’s an awful lot to learn. Not only must one learn the form and method of writing for the character itself, but one also has to associate it with a meaning or set of meanings (usually learned through association with a word from one’s native language), a few Japanese words (“KUN” readings) which themselves may be new and unfamiliar, and a seemingly random syllable or two (“ON” readings) that are frequently used in combination with the “ON” readings of other characters to form words.

For a Japanese elementary school student, on the other hand, there is no distinction between the meaning they must learn, and the Japanese words that character is used for—after all, that word is that meaning, for them. They will surely already be familiar with the vast majority of the words they encounter for a kanji, since early childhood. Meanwhile, the Japanese student will already have an assorted vocabulary including a number of words that use the “ON” reading of the new character, and so it’s easy for a teacher to point out some dozen words the student already knows, in order to illustrate how this reading lends its meaning to various words in which it appears. All that remains for the student is to match the new character to words they already know; the rest of their effort can be spent studying the actual form of the character.

In fact, well before the student even encounters their first kanji character in school, they’ll already have become familiar with the idea that certain sounds can tend to indicate one of a fixed set of meanings. They’ll certainly be familiar (as you probably are too) that the sounds “nin”, or “jin” often indicates “people” or “person” (“Amerikajin” = American; “Nihonjin” = Japanese; “ningen” = human; “tanin” = stranger; “ningyou” (person + shape) = doll; etc), or that “kai” often represents a group, association, or organization (“shakai” = society; “kaisha” = company; “kaigi” = assembly or congress). Thus, when they finally learn that “jin” or “nin” (when it’s used to mean “person”) is written as 人, and “kai” (when it’s used to mean “group”) is written 会, even if they’re only given one example word for each of those characters, a number of words containing the right sounds may very well leap to mind as words that might possibly be written with those same characters.

Not only that, but even before they start learning kanji, they may sometimes be able to deduce the meanings of new and unfamiliar words, simply because it’s constructed from the “ON” readings of characters used in other words with which they’re already familiar. If you already know the words “benri” (convenient), “fuben” (inconvenient), and “anshin” (relief; mind at ease), then chances are you may understand “fuan” as “anxiety” (not-relief, or uneasy of mind), without being told (especially if you hear it in a context that fits, such as “I’m not relieved, I’m positively anxious!”). I think it would work similarly to seeing the English word “psychology” for the first time, if you are already familiar with the words “psyche”, “psychotic”, “psychokinesis”, “technology”, “biology”, and (what the heck) “proctology”.

Kanji are not only the basic building blocks of much of the written Japanese language, but much of the spoken language as well. I suspect that a familiarity with a variety of compound words—to the point that we can begin to recognize new compound words based on the pieces from which they were constructed—will provide an excellent foundation both for learning kanji, and for improving listening comprehension.

So, I’m planning on experimenting a bit with a series of articles that explore some of the most common meanings associated with various on’yomi, along with example vocabulary, as an attempt to build up an “ear” for them (in much the same way that studying the written kanji helps one build up an “eye” for meanings). I’ve generated a list of all the on’yomi I could find for a set of some two thousand or so kanji. For each of these on’yomi, I’ve listed the most common kanji that use that on’yomi; and for each of these kanji/on’yomi pairs, there’s a list of words that use that kanji with that on’yomi. (Note that many of these words probably appear multiple times, one for each of the common kanji/on’yomi from which it’s made; also, many kanji combinations have more than one way they may be pronounced.) I plan to use this file as the basis for my series of articles.

Of course, it’s just as important to be familiar with kun’yomi, as they appear very frequently in Japanese—both alone and in compounds—and all the arguments I made for studying on’yomi apart from the kanji apply just as well for kun’yomi. However, in my opinion, studying kun’yomi is already relatively easy compared with studying on’yomi, and so merits less directed attention. In addition, learning kun’yomi is already the focus of many other vocabulary-building methods (just pick up a vocabulary-building book on verbs and adjectives, and you’ll find a wealth of kun’yomi). On’yomi strikes me as a more formidable obstacle to students of Japanese, so that’s where I plan to spend my time for now.

So, I recently took the time (about 2½ months) to work my way through volume 1 of Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji. The following is my review, which I also plan to post on Amazon.

Bottom Line: It works

Okay, so here’s the bottom line. It works. It does precisely what it sets out to do. I’ve been studying the Japanese language since I was 13 years old; it’s now been about 20 years of studying the language. It hasn’t been entirely consistent; it has often been a few months on (full-bore), a few months off (after burnout). Before I worked through RTK, I was probably familiar with around 300-400 of the most frequently-used kanji. I could never seem to get much past that hump, it always felt very much like an uphill battle, and even though I’d hit the foot of the hill running full-bore, I’d never quite make it to the top before, exhausted, I’d start to slip downhill again.

I’d beat my head against a Japanese reader for a while, which, though organized in such a way as to introduce a few characters at a time, instead of leaving you to deal with whatever characters you may happen to find in other reading materials, still progressed fairly rapidly, and was also fairly outdated. Then I’d beat my head against some “real” reading material for a while. Then I’d try to ramp myself up on gradeschool-level texts, so there’d be fewer kanji to deal with; but this doesn’t necessarily help so much, since kanji can often be a key to understanding a compound word’s roots, and help a good deal in learning the words from which they’re built.

The problem is, every time I came to an unfamiliar kanji, it would put a hard stop to the flow of my reading. I don’t know the meaning, I don’t know the pronunciation, I probably don’t know the next couple of characters after it, and I don’t know the word in which it’s appearing. I can’t continue reading until I’ve spent a while studying each individual character, how they’re pronounced in this context, and what the word means in which they appear.

Since finishing volume one of RTK (about a week ago), reading is dramatically easier for me. I still don’t know how to pronounce many of the characters, but since I’m already familiar with the character (which at this point has become like an old friend), it’s easier for me to attach a pronunciation to it, since I’m no longer having to learn the pronunciation, and the writing, and the meaning (maybe—sometimes it’s necessary to attach new meanings to old friends). Progress moves much more quickly; and often, even if I haven’t learned how to pronounce a string of kanji, I can tell right away, from the Heisig keywords, and from surrounding context, what the word’s meaning is. The first time I encountered 怒っている in some text after Heisig, I knew instantly what word it was (おこっている, roughly “is angry”), because I was already familiar with the Japanese word (but not its writing), and the Heisig keyword associated with that character was “anger”. Similarly, words like 簡単 (かんたん, simplicity + simple/not complex = easy) and 閉じる (とじる, to close) are immediately clear at first encounter, without having to look them up (though doing so to learn the pronunciation is advisable).

Even words whose meanings don’t happen to match the particular keywords I learned, such as 設定 (せってい, establishment + fix (in place) = “preferences/settings” (for computer programs)?), or 削除 (さくじょ, plane + exclude = delete/remove?) are easy to remember, and deepen my understanding of the characters’ true meanings (削 = plane, but also “to whittle”). Even learning 弾 as “bullet”, and then later discovering its use as “play (an instrument)”, isn’t a problem: I already know how to write it, and one of its meanings, so it’s easy to add the new meaning. Easier than learning it without context and without familiarity with its primitives (弓/bow + 単/simple), and trying to learn it amidst a sea of other graphically unrelated characters surrounding it. Basically, just having something that takes away about one and a half (how to write + an approximation of the meaning) of the three or four things I usually have to study at once when learning a kanji – how to write it, what the character means, how to pronounce it in this specific context, and the meaning of the whole word or compound in which it appears – eases the process for me tremendously.

I wish I’d found and studied this book years ago, as I’d be much much further along in my understanding of Japanese at this point if I had.

What it does not do

But let’s be clear: completing this book (or even this series) is not the end of your journey—not by a long shot. Having completed this book, you can’t claim (or at least shouldn’t, though many do) to “know” ~2,000 kanji characters. You do not. You do know “how to write” about 2,000 kanji characters, and you know a meaning for each one (not necessarily the only meaning, or even the most usual meaning). You don’t know how to pronounce a single one of these newly-learned kanji in a single context, unless you already knew beforehand. (If you proceed to volume 2, you will find a system to organize your learning of the “on’yomi” of the various characters, primarily based on signal primatives that give a strong clue to characters’ pronunciation—I’ve heard many people say you don’t need volume 2, and this is true, but I personally find it useful enough to have. Just take what you can use from it, and ditch the rest; don’t feel obligated to do it exactly as laid out.)

So you’ve learned the kanji 生 as “life”. Good for you. But how about its meanings of “student”, or “fresh”, or “birth”, or “breathe”, or “grow”? Is it pronounced セイ or ショウ, or maybe it’s なま or う.まれる or い.きる or は.える? Well, if you haven’t learned what it means and how to say it in each of a variety of contexts (all commonplace), you can hardly claim to “know” it, can you? (If you’re panicking at seeing how confusing it can be to know what a single character means and how to pronounce it, please relax: 生 is a bit of an extreme example; while there are several characters that have a wide variety of meanings or pronunciations, most have only a couple, and in fact, many “kun’yomi” are shared across multiple kanji—which one should be used depends on the nuance intended, or context.)

Completing RTK vol. 1 is not the end or even the middle of your kanji-learning experience (unless of course, like me, you were already middle-ish in your kanji-learning journey). It is the beginning: it serves as an excellent foundation (but only the foundation) for proceeding to learn real meanings and pronunciations in a variety of contexts, which is something you can only really get by reading plenty of material.

Note: The majority of complaints I’ve seen about the Heisig system seem to be that it doesn’t do various things it’s not trying to do in the first place—possibly because some of the people who complete the system claim that it does… “Now I know 2,000 kanji characters!” …no, you don’t. The other common complaint I hear is that no one who finishes this book goes on to gain an intermediate-to-advanced understanding of Japanese. This is silly, as in order for this to be true, the book would actually have to have some property that prevents you from further study. Pssht. In any case, nearly every time this challenge is issued, someone steps forward as a counter-example.

Do not kid yourself that all you have to do is read and visualize each of the kanji in order, and you’ll have learned to recognize 2,000 characters at the end of the book, without ever spending any time to review the ones you learned before. A few reviewers have complained that by the time they got to the end of the book, they’d forgotten all the previous characters from the rest of the book. Well, I mean, duh? Heisig not only never said you wouldn’t have to do any reviews, rather he outlines a specific system for you to use in reviewing them. So, um… review ’em.

Actually, I recommend ignoring his system for creating (and using) flashcards, and using a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) such as Anki, or http://kanji.koohii.com/ instead. Anki has several sets of flashcards for RTK that you can download right from within the application, and kanji.koohii.com is geared specifically for RTK. You will not only need to review, you will need to review a lot. You will become frustrated at how quickly you can forget kanji, or at least pieces of kanji, and how certain kanji (fortunately just a handful for me) keep slipping from your memory over and over (tip: if the “story” you’re using isn’t working, use a new one—however, some keywords may be inherently difficult to make associations for). The point isn’t that RTK eliminates the need for repetitive review (he does state that repeated writing of kanji is unnecessary for learning, but that’s different; either way, though, take that advice with a grain (or more) of salt), but that it significantly reduces that need (you need to review, but instead of reviewing entire character forms, you’re mostly reviewing stories, plus infrequent idiosyncratic changes to primitive forms, or unusual primitive positions).

Things it does poorly

Alright, now for some complaints about the book. Honestly, RTK sucks (it just happens to suck way less than any other method I’ve tried). The keywords chosen for kanji are frequently very poor choices (IMO). I imagine I’ll never have a clue as to why the keyword “junior” was chosen for 徒. In several cases, the English keywords themselves are obscure, and I have to look them up in a dictionary. “Decameron”?

Likewise, not enough effort is made to ensure the student chooses a helpful connotation of the keyword (Okay, the keyword is “mould”. Is that “mould” as in “there’s mould on my bread”, or is it “mould” as in “to shape” (and what’s with that British spelling for “mold” anyway 😉 )? Is it “gain” as in “he’s gaining on me”, or as in accquiring something?) Effort is made, but usually for keywords I didn’t actually need much help with, and for far too few of thsoe I really did need. Using the keyword in an example sentence for each character (or something) would have been appreciated.

Also, the “stories” used in the book are frequently very, very poor for visual association. Often they are obscure and rambling monologues with only light connections to the elements in the kanji. I very frequently replaced them with my own visualized connections, and was quite happy when Heisig finally stopped providing his own clumsy narratives.

Wait, didn’t I basically criticize the implementation of every one of the key features of this system? Why yes, yes, I did. Why do I still recommend this book, then (you may ask)? Because in the end it doesn’t matter so much that he didn’t do any of these things well; in the end, that he did them is really all that matters. He provided unique keywords to associate with each primitive and each character, so that you can easily review from keyword-to-kanji. If you don’t like ’em, you can swap ’em with your own (just be sure to check that they are unique – use the index at the back of the book to see if your keyword is already taken). He teaches the characters only after all their component pieces have been learned, which vastly improves the learning experience—instead of learning character forms, you’re learning character components, and just putting them together. As for the stories, you can always substitute your own (and, for the majority of the book, are required to in any case).

Of course, substituting your own keywords would require you to already be familiar enough to realize that the one chosen for you isn’t helpful. But the truth is, even if you learn a keyword that has nothing to do with the most common meaning (or even really any meaning) you’re going to see this character used for, you have the character in your arsenal. Once you’ve learned 徒 as “junior”, even if “junior” has little to do with anything, you still recognize the character, are comfortable and familiar with it. If you should then learn to think of it as “disciple” (キリスト教徒 = Christian, イスラム教徒 = Muslim, 聖徒 = disciple/adherent), it’s not remotely hard to replace the keyword you learned with a new meaning (which is what you’ll have to do anyway for many characters, even when the keyword you’ve learned is an actual meaning of the character).

Basically: the primitive keywords suck, and the stories suck, but you don’t need the stories, and the keywords are only a temporary association anyway that you’ll later either expand on or replace outright. The book does a good job of teaching you how to write the characters properly, and illustrates the differences between printed and written forms; and most of all, it presents everything in an order that streamlines learning.

Shortcomings to the system

The system itself has a few disadvantages which are worth mentioning, even though in my opinion they are crushingly outweighed by the advantages of this system.

First, a significant portion of your energy in reviewing and associating the characters with keywords, is that many of the keywords are confusingly similar. This is an unavoidable consequence of trying to map each character to a unique and individual keyword, since many kanji have very close meanings (which are often used to reinforce eachother when they are paired to make a kanji compound word). “Exam”, “examination”, and “test” are separate keywords. “Admonish”, “criticize”, “rebuke”, and “censure”. “Shoulder” versus “shouldered”. “Marriage”, “matrimony”, and “marry into”. Some keywords differ only very, very slightly. During review (per Heisig, always keyword-to-kanji, never the reverse), I’ll sometimes get mixed up and write the character for a similar but different keyword. I’ll then have to devote some time into focusing on what connotations the different words have that I can add to my stories to better distinguish them. This is energy I would not have to spend in learning kanji “normally”; I would learn the characters just from the contexts in which I see them used, and be able to distinguish them just on that basis, even when they have essentially the same meaning. I wouldn’t have to concentrate to think which character was associated to some specific meaning; instead, I’d just know which of the similar characters I “meant”, and use that.

Additionally, this system comes with a condition: it only really works if you work through it all at once, to the exclusion of other study methods. I don’t think you can effectively combine this with other systems simultaneously, and Heisig himself says this at least once in the introduction. This means that you have to work through all 2,000+ characters before you can begin making any use of any of them. This can be a daunting task to contemplate, and this is only for the worse since as far as I know, this system will not be effective if it is interrupted. If you drop it partway through, you can’t pick it up again where you left off, unless of course you’ve been dilligently reviewing those keywords that you had learned up to that point the whole time you were away.

For my part, I had beat my head against other methods for quite long enough to be motivated to work all the way through without stopping, and I’ve been rewarded with an excellent foundation for continuing my kanji studies.

Comparison to Kanji ABC

It’s worth pointing out a similar system for learning the Kanji: Kanji ABC. It takes a very similar approach to learning the kanji, and in particular focuses on the same key concept behind RTK: learn the primitives first, and build your knowledge of the characters from that. In my opinion, it also has a tendency to choose more useful keywords for the primitives than RTK does. However, it suffers from two shortcomings that really prevent it from being as effective as RTK, in my opinion: first, it does not teach unique, reviewable keywords for the characters themselves; only for the primitives, so you really can’t use it in isolation; you’d have to study each character thoroughly (using external means) in order to really retain any information about them. Second, it only demonstrates the printed forms of kanji, which can differ significantly from the written forms, and doesn’t really provide great coverage in general on how to write the characters.

Conclusion

I would love to see someone completely rework this system, and perhaps choose better keywords, and address some of the other problems I mentioned above. However, it still remains at this time, the most effective system for quickly gaining a solid repertoire of characters, and at the end of it, you really can read Japanese much more effectively. You obviously can’t read without effort and further study, but the difference in ability is well worth the 2 to 4 months you will have spent in study with RTK.

In this article, I’m covering some of the readings for the kanji character 「見」. I assume the reader is familiar with the readings for 「見る・見ます」, and try to focus instead on a couple of readings found in compound words.

Following that, I list some examples of other kanji characters besides 「見」 that are used to write the verb 「みる」.

Please note: These examples come from a combination of my own authorship, and various snippets from the Tanaka Corpus of example sentences. They may not be relied upon for accuracy, as in some cases they were not written by native Japanese writers; they are intended to illustrate their particular readings and how they might be used, to the best of the author’s ability to provide them.

Additionally, this article explains my current, quite probably flawed, understanding of how the verb 「みる」 is written for various nuances. Believe at your own risk; verify all information against authentic Japanese texts as you are able. Also, note that in many of the cases where I use a kanji character other than 「見」 to write the verb 「みる」, you will find many cases where 「見」 is used in the same situation. Regarding some of these, I have heard mixed claims from Japanese as to whether such usages are “correct” or not; but they certainly happen quite frequently. 「見」 seems to be beginning to replace some of its cousins as a sort of “default” form for 「みる」, even in some cases where it may not be the most appropriate character of choice.

見 Readings

She may seem pretty meek on first glance, but I get the sense she can get things done when she needs to.

かのじょ彼女はat first lookいっ一けん見appears meekおとなしそうだけど、やるとき時はやるってかん感じ。

He is apparently a pianist.

かれ彼はいっ一けん見ピアニストらしい。

I knew at a glance that he was an honest man.

わたし私は一見してかれ彼がhonest personしょう正じき直もの者だとわかった。

His appearance has changed so much that you may well not recognize him.

観る

観る might be used used over 見る to indicate that you are watching something take place, or that you saw something happen. It is particularly used in reference to “seeing” or “watching” a play, movie, or TV program.

She is seeing a Kabuki play now.

かのじょ彼女はいま今、か歌ぶ舞き伎をみ観ているところだ。

Many Americans love to watch the I Love Lucy show.

おお多くのアメリカ人はテレビで「アイ・ラブ・ルーシー」をみ観るのがす好きだ。

I saw him run away.

わたしはかれ彼がrun away; fleeに逃げていくのをみ観た。

Tom saw a play in the new theater.

トムはあたら新しいtheater; playhouseげき劇じょう場でplayげき劇を観た。

I get goose bumps when I see a horror movie.

ホラーえい映が画を観ると私はgoosebumpsとり鳥はだ肌がたってしまう。

視る

視る might be used in preference to 見る when the “seeing” isn’t really referring to just the concept of something visible literally being before you and being seen, even though it might be. One article I read stated that 見る is when light bounces off an object and hits your cornea; whereas 視る is everything that happens after that (how your brain processes it). You 見る a painting, but you 視る the objects within a painting. 視る could be used to refer to seeing hallucinations (though 見る is also used).

視る can mean “to regard,” “to notice,” or “to take notice”; for instance, it is used in the word 無視 (むし) which combines with 無 (without; not) to mean “ignore”.

As far as I can tell, it occurs much more commonly in kana than with the kanji, but it’s worth being able to recognize it, and understand how it differs from 見る. The examples below are all from me, and so are particularly iffy; I have not been able to find many occurrences, and most of those I found seemed to be using it for technical language expressing cognitive “seeing”, as opposed to purely visual “seeing”. Knowing this, keep in mind that all of the examples given below are a bit contrived, as you most often wouldn’t see them written with that kanji; they’d probably be written with kana, or even with the character 見.

You were in the dream I had last night.

きのう昨日のばん晩み視たゆめ夢には、あなたがいた。

He’s regarded as a musician, but he doesn’t play any instrument.

彼はおん音がく楽か家としてみ視ているけど、なにもひ弾けないよ。

Although he was there the whole night, Mr Yamada never noticed that man at all.

ひと一ばん晩ちゅう中いたけど、そのひとは山田さんがぜん全ぜん然視なかった。

診る

I am going to see the dentist (lit.: have the dentist see me) tomorrow.

Learning Japanese through reading practice can be very frustrating (probably a familiar theme by now). Instead of simply learning just new vocabulary or new characters, you’re often trying to learn new characters, new radical/sub-component characters that made up the character you’re studying (in order to help you understand how its components combined to provide the meaning it has), 4 or 5 or 10 possible pronunciations this character might have depending on a variety of contexts, new vocabulary and compounds that use this character, and maybe even some new, previously unfamiliar grammar points or nuances to the phrase you’re trying to study. I often feel that attempting to learn vocabulary and characters by reading through Japanese text is an exercise in sheer force of will: just pushing through and tackling all these items simultaneously, just to learn sufficiently about one character in one word, and having to start it all over again for the next tiny fraction of a phrase I’m trying to both comprehend and learn for future benefit.

I’ve used a variety of techniques to help me expand my repertoire of kanji, and none of them are a panacea. I’ll spend some time trying to read through grade-school books. This has the advantage of having a much lower density of kanji to learn at one time, but a disadvantage in that kanji-derived vocabulary is actually much quicker to learn if I understand them from their component kanji, giving me insight to why it’s pronounced that way, and associating those sounds to the word’s meaning. So I’ll get into some heavier reading, in order to focus more on learning kanji than on learning vocabulary, but of course I run into the problems I described in the paragraph above. Then I’ll turn to a Japanese reader for learners, where it provides the vocab and character readings for me right there (but of course only the readings for what I happen to be reading right then and there). Then I’ll try learning kanji through means other than reading them in a sentence; for instance, going through a list of kanji by order of frequency-of-use. That way, each new character I learn will be applicable in a maximum of reading situations: I’ll get the biggest bang for my learning buck. Or I’ll spend some time learning more about characters that are also components of other, more complex characters; they may not be especially frequently-used characters, but knowing them will enable me to better understand and learn about the more frequently-used characters.

But I get to feeling like I’m studying each of these methods through sheer force of will, and not at all feeling like I’m learning fluidly, easily, or naturally, fighting my way tooth-and-nail for every inch of gained territory, banging my head against the same wall until I get a headache, switching to pounding against it with my fist until the skin of my hands is too raw. The problem with all these methods is, I’ll learn all I need to know about what I need for that specific situation, and maybe some related studying for my future understanding—but I won’t get to practice that knowledge, so I stand a pretty solid chance of losing it.

What I really liked about Miller’s A Japanese Reader (see my previous article) is that it starts from zero, and builds up to a fairly complete repertoire of characters. This is great, because I’m not so much jumping into a sea of characters, trying to grab each fish with my hands (while struggling to keep the fish I already had), as sitting with a net by a stream, nabbing each fish as it comes past me one by one, and tossing it in with the others. However, the text moves too fast, and doesn’t require enough repeat encounters with the same information to keep me from losing what I’ve learned so far (if I stick to the net-and-stream analogy, then there’s a gaping tear in my net). Also, it’s all old texts so it’s significantly out-of-date (some of the fish aren’t particularly edible?).

The Reading Japanese book by Eleanor Jorden (again, see the article) does a much better job of letting you become familiar with each new character before you have to deal with the next. It frequently seems like it brings up some previous character at just the right time. Even with the kana (syllabic) characters it introduces as few as possible as are necessary to start using them to form words. It’s a pretty ideal way to learn; unfortunately, it doesn’t teach as many characters as it might (425) and it too is fairly out-of-date in some of its information. Both Reading Japanese and A Japanese Reader suffer from the fact that they depend on other books to teach the grammar they use in the book, and are designed to be used in lock-step with other materials that are no longer in print today (despite the fact that these books themselves are).

There are some things I really wish had been explained to me earlier on in my Japanese learning career. One of the earliest things I learned was that the verb “miru” can be used for any of “to see, to watch, to look at”. When I started to learn kanji, I learned that “miru” is written 見る. No one bothered to explain to me that it might be more appropriate to write as 観る in some situations where “to watch” is meant (such as “I forgot to watch The Daily Show last night”), or as 視る if I mean “to view”. Every time I come across a new character for a verb or an adjective, I have to do some legwork to find out whether there are other characters used for the same (or nearly the same, and homophonic) word for subtly different contexts. But none of the textbooks or learning resources I had taught me to do this; I’ve learned to do so through experience. Worse (much, much worse!) there are no Japanese-to-English dictionaries I’ve ever encountered that even bother to differentiate properly about which one to use and when! Usually all the variant writings are just listed alongside each other for the same definition. If there are examples, they may illustrate some of the uses properly, but not in wide enough range to give the learner a clue. This can be a major problem! It would be much, much, much better if this had been explained to me from the start, and if every time a new character was introduced for words that also used other characters in different situations, some context was given to make it quite clear in which contexts I should and should not choose this particular character to express a word.

For about the last year or so, ideas have been percolating in my head about what an effective system for learning to read Japanese might be. I would love a system that combined the strengths of some of my favorite systems, while avoiding as many of their weaknesses as possible. Learning shouldn’t have to be an impressive display of abilities in concentration and determination. It should introduce characters a few at a time, building only on previous repertoire (unlike typical “reader/collection” texts, which tend to dump the characters of a normal block of text on you, without building on previous studies), and reiterate previously studied material often enough to keep it fresh in your mind, without moving too quickly, and providing a sufficient repertoire of characters before the end to allow the student to be able to recognize and understand most of the characters they encounter in other, more natural Japanese texts.

A lot of students are under the impression that they must learn all 1,945 (soon to be more) of the Jōyō Kanji (those required to be taught to children at school from 1st grade through high school), but I’m not convinced that’s the case. All kanji characters are not created equal. According to the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary, from an analysis of data collected from a year’s worth of issues of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shin’bun, understanding just the 500 most frequently-used kanji provides eighty percent coverage of the papers’ text! One quarter of the nearly two thousand characters in the Jōyō Kanji set provide coverage for four out of five of every kanji in the text! And knowing the top thousand kanji gives you 95% coverage!

Of course, 80% coverage still means that you’re having to struggle with one out of every five characters, which is still a bit too frequent to read comfortably. 95% is a great deal better, but you’re still looking up one out of twenty. Still, it at least provides enough of a foundation that you may only have to look up one or two in each sentence (more on some, maybe none on others—it’s an average, after all). Enough that studying the remaining kanji required to get truly comfortable won’t be such an incredibly daunting task.

Also, keep in mind that any sort of frequency analysis from just one source is liable to be biased. Looking over frequency lists taken from analysis of newspapers, I see characters related to politics, business and government at much higher positions than I imagine they’d appear in, say, literature, or manga. Still, quite a lot of it should correspond to the most important characters from a wider variety of sources, and pretty much the same principles of coverage should apply.

Ideally, characters that are component parts of more complex characters should be introduced before those characters (even if they occur less frequently). We may be wasting time on “lesser” characters where the more complex character will be handier in reading real-world texts, but the less frequently-encountered character could make it easier to understand and remember the more frequently-encountered character, which could make the detour worthwhile.

Of course, if we introduce too many obscure component characters just to provide study keys for the more complex characters, we may be spending too much energy learning them. And the value of learning these component characters may depend a great deal on whether we want to focus on simply recognizing characters on site, or be able to actually write them out correctly. It takes much greater familiarity with the character’s form and components to write than it does to recognize.

I took a look at a few sort-by-usage-frequency lists, and made some gut decisions about what might be the minimum number of characters I’d need to know in order to feel fairly comfortable in reading a book with a dictionary in hand. The first 500 characters from newspaper-based lists have many many characters that I recognize to be essential, but there were still quite a lot of essential characters that are outside of that group. I started looking through the list, noting how often I’d see characters that I was familiar with and knew to be pretty crucial. Around the thousand-character mark it started feeling like a tolerably low leverl of important characters, but I was still seeing a lot of important characters beyond there. I made up a list based on the first thousand most frequently-used characters as identified by Monash University’s KANJIDIC, which used data collected by Alexandre Girardi from four years of Mainichi Shin’bun issues; and hand-picked about eighty additional characters from the next 700 frequently-used characters (positions 1001-1700 in the list) that I knew I’d personally encountered more than once during reading (yeah, I know: not very scientific).

Alright, so given all this, here’s my thoughts on what I currently consider to be an ideal system for improving Japanese reading abilities.

Reading exercises should be fun, and not drone on mindlessly (perhaps unlike this article—sorry). It should be interesting, gripping, or at least humorous… anything to make it fun, providing enough motivation to keep learning.

It should be as natural as possible. Instead of requiring you to try to come up with sufficiently clever mnemonics and visualizations that will help you finally remember the character (but ultimately fail to provide you with keys for the various pronunciations in various contexts), it will rely on repetition and reinforcement to keep the information fresh in your mind. New concepts should be hammered in at first, and only gradually drift into the general background, being sure to make frequent reappearances.

The complete array of a given character’s common pronunciations and uses should be studied together. It doesn’t help much to learn just one portion of a character’s typical uses, if that’s not the use you happen to encounter when you’re reading “real” Japanese texts.

Anything that gets in the way of actual reading (where reading includes comprehension, of course) should be avoided as much as possible. Studying vocabulary lists (or flipping back and forth between them and the text) puts a halt to the reading; new words and kanji should be introduced in the text itself, accompanied by an annotation providing the translation for this context… it should become apparant through varied use what the more detailed definition is.

The most frequently-encountered kanji should appear before less frequent ones.

It should introduce a sufficient set of characters that reading “real” Japanese texts is not hampered by lack of kanji knowledge.

Ideally, it would also familiarize the student with characters as they are commonly used for names of people and places.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, no system matching these criteria is available, to my knowledge. If I want to use a system like this, I’ll have to create it. It would be much, much better if someone with a much, much greater knowledge of the Japanese language would create this, as I’m prone to make plenty of mistakes, teach some things that aren’t true, and especially, write Japanese that would look a little strange to actual Japanese readers. But no one else has done it yet, and I (and I think others) need this, even if it’s far from perfect, so I believe I’ll make an attempt. If I make it as open a process as possible, perhaps I can find collaborators that would be willing to help me edit and polish, and to correct my mistakes and my poor Japanese.

But in order to create such a work in a remotely feasible amount of time, I’ll have to make certain compromises:

It will focus almost exclusively on learning new kanji. Kana-only vocabulary, and enhanced knowledge of grammar, will not be priorities, though they will receive light treatment.

The focus will be on reading, not writing. Information about stroke order, and differentiating handwritten forms from printed forms, will not be included. Since these days Japanese is more often typed than written by hand, this seems a reasonable priority decision. However, the ability to choose the right character to express a given word is just as important when typing as when writing, so reading exercises will attempt to give students the tools they need in order to make the right choices.

Characters that form components of other characters won’t be added to the list of ~1,080 characters I plan to include. However, such characters that are already among the highest-frequency characters that were slated for learning, will be moved toward the front so that they occur before the characters that incorporate them.

A certain level of understanding of Japanese grammar and vocabulary will be presumed. This is not for beginning students, but for intermediate students that wish to come to an advanced-intermediate level of kanji knowledge.

I guess we’ll find out what comes of this. I’ll be doing this for my own benefit primarily, because I really, really need for this to exist. But I’ll need someone else to come along and fix it.

Update 2010-06-14: I now have a list I’ve compiled. I started with the 1,081 characters I had decided were a decent set to learn in order to acquire an ability to read comfortably. I then wrote a couple of Perl scripts that added annotations each entry. The first annotation calls out various other kanji characters that are also used to write essentially the same, or a confusingly similar and identically pronounced, word. This is intended to give me the tools I need to clearly demonstrate in what contexts this kanji should be used, and in which it should not. The second annotation is a list of compound words that include just this character, and all the previous characters that had already been introduced (the ones that appear above it in the list).

With this list, I should be able to get started on actually creating reading exercises along the lines of what I wanted. I also need to find a comfortable medium for creating these exercises, something that will allow me to include clearly-legible furigana annotations above words in the main text, and word meanings below.

As I mentioned before (here and here), learning Japanese can be very frustrating. Here are some resources that I found to be better-than-average at helping me find the next footing. Many of them have unique qualities that made them enormously helpful in some way; but nearly all of them also have major shortcomings.

Essential Japanese by Samuel E. Martin. I can’t even begin to describe how enormously helpful this book is. It taught me more in one, literally pocket-sized, 460-page volume than I had previously understood from 18 years of studying Japanese on-and-off through classes at a Japanese Buddhist church, university courses, and various resources I used for self-teaching.

Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly outdated, and much the vocabulary is specialized for post-World War II military basemen and Christian missionaries, who were the primary target market for this book (probably making up the majority of Americans living in Japan). It’s also out of print; all these things make it somewhat difficult to recommend for general use. It teaches some extremely formal language that has nothing to do with “Essential Japanese” any longer—it’s pretty much only spoken around royalty, and most people aren’t dining with the Emperor’s family. It’s great for understanding super-formal speech in a Samurai movie, maybe, not much else. But on the other hand, you won’t easily find explanations of these speech modes anywhere else, and in addition it explains language that really is crucial to understand in a very straightforward manner, that I hadn’t seen addressed in other textbooks I’d used. It is at the same time the most complete and most concise book on Japanese grammar I’ve had the pleasure to know.

It’s worth noting that it does not use any sort of Japanese writing system other than romaji (latin letters).

Nintendo DS + Dictionary software. The Nintendo DS is, of course, a video game system, but Nintendo and other publishers have actually made available plenty of great software for Japanese language studies on the DS. The dictionary software I use is this one: 漢字そのまま・楽引き辞典 (kanji sono mama/rakubikijiten), which means something like “Kanji As-It’s-Written” Easy-Lookup Dictionary. It’s a Japanese-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionary, intended for Japanese users (the interface is in Japanese), but the great thing about it is that you can just draw in the characters you want to look up. This makes it easy to look up words, even if they’re made up of characters you’ve never seen before! Without a tool like this, it used to take me several minutes just to look up one character; if I was trying to look up a word made up of several characters that weren’t familiar to me, I could spend around 10 minutes on each character (finding the primary radical, and counting the total strokes, perhaps getting the stroke-count wrong, checking the other stroke-count entries…), and then spend a few minutes on the dictionary while I try each of the several pronunciations that character might have to see which one is being used in this case. Looking it in while writing it is just loads easier!

The character-recognition is very forgiving, and frequently recognizes the character I’m trying for, even when I’m writing on a bumpy train or shuttle, and can’t really even recognize the character I wrote myself! If it guesses wrong, it gives you the chance to choose from close alternatives. Occasionally I have trouble making it understand the character I wanted; this is most often due to getting the ordering of strokes wrong (most of the time it forgives this as well, but there are times it doesn’t). In general, though, I spend seconds performing a lookup that could’ve taken me twenty minutes!

Unfortunately, the quality of the Japanese-English dictionary entries themselves leaves much to be desired; often, I’ll use the Nintendo DS to identify the word, and then look up the word in a different dictionary in order to actually gain understanding of it. The Japanese-Japanese entries tend to be better, but of course that can have the tendency of sending me looking up other words from the definition… not ideal. Still, it’s well worth the money I spent; I might leave my paper dictionary at home, but I always have my DS with me if I plan to do any Japanese reading.

This is a truly excellent resource for learning written Japanese. Great pains were taken to introduce the characters in such a way that they can be used immediately and repeatedly from that point forward. For instance, when beginning with the Katakana characters, rather than teaching the characters in canonical order, it starts with just the two characters “su” and “mi”, and from those teaches you to write “Sue”, “Smith”, “Miss Sue Smith”, etc. It then quickly builds on these, ensuring at each step that the next small set of characters introduces a large array of new things you can immediately learn to write.

Accusations that the material is out-of-date, are not wrong (this is the reason I must give the book four stars rather than five). The book was published in 1976! Much of the kanji is used a little differently, or has been replaced in certain uses by other characters. Of course, most of it is still applicable, and when no newer resources come even close to being as effective, you learn you must make do with information that may be out-of-date–better to have slightly-dated but solid knowledge of the most common uses of several hundred kanji than to continue to struggle to learn your first hundred or so.

A note on romanization: you should not be scared off by the fact that it uses “si” instead of “shi”, or “hu” instead of “fu”. Many Japanese will romanize similarly, and a serious student of the language will need to become comfortable with systems such as Kun’rei-shiki in addition to the more popular (at least among English speakers) Hepburn romanization system. Recognizing “si” and “shi” as the same phoneme with the same pronunciation will help the student become stronger in the language.

What I really love about this book is it provides a lot of meat in a very small package. The book is both small enough and complete enough, that you can simply grab it on your way out the door, to work on when you’re standing in line, or on the bus, etc. Each story is less than two small pages, so you get your sense of accomplishment quicker. 🙂

On the pages opposing the Japanese stories are the english translations; but I don’t find the translations so useful as the sentence-by-sentence destruction (which repeats the Japanese, but with furigana) and commentary that follows after each story. Each sentence is further decomposed almost word-by-word, and includes such things as explanations of common idioms, and even pointing out puns and wordplay.

Since the decompositions provide all the readings for the kanji and explanations of the vocabulary, the book is really all you need to read the passages. You don’t need to grab your kanji and wa-ei dictionaries (though I tend to anyway, in case I want to gain a little more insight).

Because of the furigana, I don’t think strong knowledge of kanji is necessary to enjoy this book (though of course it will make it easier: you may not need to flip to the commentary as often). A working, intermediate knowledge of Japanese grammar, however, is important, as you’re generally assumed to understand various verb forms and sentence patterns.

The main drawing feature of this book is that it starts from zero understanding of Japanese writing systems (but not of grammar), and builds up to bring you to a complete repertoire of not only the kana syllabaries, but the full set of the 1,850 tōyō kanji characters (the precursor to the current set of 1,945 jōyō kanji that are required to be considered “literate” in Japanese, which didn’t exist yet when this was originally written).

As you might guess from that last sentence, this book is old. It was first written in 1962, and in fact, some of the earlier lessons are intended to be used alongside Martin’s Essential Japanese book at the top of the list; in fact, I originally bought my copy of Essential Japanese for exactly that reason (I had the Reader first).

I admire the aspirations, and the book has been very useful to me, but I’ll admit I’ve never gotten much beyond lesson 30 (of 75). It is very fast-paced, very demanding, and doesn’t really reiterate often enough in my opinion, so there’s a good chance of losing what you’ve gained.

This book is a great help for finding tricks to learn kanji characters more quickly. However, I don’t think it’s sufficient on its own to really complete learning these characters.

The book is divided into two parts; Part I is a repertoire of around 250 “graphemes”, kanji “pieces” that are used to build up actual kanji characters, but may not necessarily form characters of their own. If that sounds like the definition of a “radical”, well good: they’re closely related. However, there are various graphemes that are not officially considered radicals, so you might consider the graphemes to be a superset of the radicals.

Each grapheme is associated with an english word or phrase. The book is fairly careful to use different words for very similar meanings, so that you can manage to keep them separate.

Part II is a list of two thousand kanji characters, ordered in such a way as to make full use of the graphemes learned. The kanji are ordered so that the characters only use those graphemes that have already been introduced in the associated group from Part I. Each character is listed along with only its very most common readings (kun and on), and a list of the english words representing the graphemes from which it has been built (which appear in an index at the back of the book).

The book is intended to be used in one of two ways: one way (the way I’ve chosen to use it) is to learn all of the graphemes in Part I (or at least a large number), and then use Part II to look up characters you wish to learn, and see which graphemes it is made up of. Of course, in reality, you wouldn’t normally need to look them up to begin with if you know all the graphemes: you’ll recognize them in the characters themselves.

The other way this book is intended to be used, is to systematically learn all the characters of Part II, by learning one group of graphemes, and then studying all the characters from Part II for that same group (which will be ordered appropriately). According to the preface, this is the “ideal” way to use the book. However, I don’t really see that as practically possible, without the use of a more detailed kanji dictionary (such as The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary. Because, for on readings, you can’t really get a feel for a character without seeing in what compounds it appears, and how; and learning kun readings can be very misleading, since often a single adjective (atatakai) or verb (hajimeru) may be written using multiple alternative kanji, depending on the context and subtle differences in meaning that are intended. Thus, Kanji ABC might be adequate by itself to learn to _read_ the most common cases where these characters appear, but is quite inadequate for learning when to _write_ them.

The nice thing about this book is that it provides just the tools you need to help grasp the components of a given kanji character, and little else. It doesn’t bog you down with _why_ these components have been associated with a given meaning. In the end I think this helps you to learn them more quickly. Other books that may focus more on a character’s etymology (such as A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters (Tuttle language library) (Japanese Edition) can be very enlightening, but in the end they tend to just confuse, as the original etymology of the characters can often have little to do with the modern form and meaning. On the other hand, the trade-off is that you often don’t get the “true, original meaning” of a radical or grapheme, just the one that makes it easiest to combine it with other graphemes to learn a kanji.

I mentioned this book in the review above for Kanji ABC. Basically, this is the book I used to use to accomplish about the same things for which I now use the tricks from Kanji ABC. That doesn’t mean that Kanji ABC is better; they both have their points. Kanji ABC assigns words/concepts to individual “graphemes” without really explaining them; the Guide will dissect a character into its original ideographic components, referring to historical forms and meanings. But often, it will end up by saying “but its current meaning is totally different”, and all that build-up for grasping its history may well turn out to be for nothing as far as actually finding the keys for remembering the character is concerned.

Kanji ABC is pretty much oriented around learning hundreds of “graphemes” and their associated concepts, which afterward can be recognized in actual characters, and using it in the reverse to look up an arbitrary character and then break it into its individual concepts doesn’t really work as effectively (in my opinion). The Guide works a bit better for that, since you don’t have to go looking up the other components it broke into (apart from components which are themselves other characters), and it provides you a workable mnemonic phrase right there in the entry.

Learning Japanese

(Amazon link.) This is a fairly academic, university student-oriented book. I don’t know how it compares on the whole with other Japanese textbooks, since these are the ones I happened to use in University and in my classes as a teen. However, I will say, the one thing I really, really have come to appreciate about it is that it focuses a lot of its energy and book-space on drills, lots and lots of drills. Reading drills, question/response drills, transformation drills (where you start with a word and build or modify a sentence as it introduces new words to add to your “sentence”), etc. It gives you a firm stepping-stool into that crucial skill of thinking in Japanese, rather than translating to and from English. Although I can’t claim to really be doing that, I’m much closer to it than I would otherwise be, thanks to this book (and I’d probably be much closer if I just went back and went through these drills again).

Japanese books for school-age children.

When I want to get into reading Japanese without straining myself over kanji, it helps to find some Japanese material intended for school-age children (who themselves are still learning kanji). I’ve picked up a few books from the Kinokuniya bookstore I’m fortunate to have nearby in San Jose from the series, イッキによめる！ (ikki ni yomeru! “Read in one go!” Amazon.co.jp link), which are collections of Japanese folk tales, with one book for each year of grade school. One nice thing about this is that these stories tend, more than most other books I’ve read, to use a lot of colloquialisms, which is a great way to learn some areas of Japanese you might not otherwise be familiar with. Edit 2010/8/10: On the other hand, encountering a lot of unfamiliar grammar can be a challange; and dealing with text that uses very little kanji can sometimes make it harder to find where the word breaks are. Additionally, if the grade-school text includes vocabulary that’s new to you, including words that would normally be written using kanji, those kanji might have served as aides to understanding the words’ meanings, which you’ll obviously now have to live without. Nonetheless, it can be a useful tool.

This is part two of a series on the frustrations of learning the Japanese language. The foregoing assumes you’ve already read part one (though you should be able to get along without it: it’ll just start somewhat abruptly).

Learning Through Reading Japanese

I believe that my voracious appetite for reading is directly responsible for an enhanced understanding of English; and when you want to master a language, it stands to reason that you should expose yourself to as much reading material written in it as possible. This makes it all the more frustrating, that learning Japanese through exposure to its written language is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and tedious.

For instance, suppose you’re confronted with a Japanese sentence such as:

明日図書館へ行きましょうか?

Assuming that you’ve studied your approximate hundred hiragana characters (half of which are just systematic modifications of the basic 46 forms), you’ll have no problems with the へ and きましょうか bits, and since hiragana is a syllabery, you instantly know how they sound, too: even though they don’t represent much in terms of meaning until you know what are the more complicated-looking characters that remain (the kanji).

But what can you do with the kanji (明日図書館, and 行), if you’ve never encountered them before? It’s not like you can look each up in a dictionary by its name, since you don’t know it. Literally all you know at this point is its shape. And that’s what you end up having to look it up by. Many characters can be broken into separate constituent parts that might be common to other characters, or are possibly complete characters in their own rights—for instance, 明 can be broken into 日 and 月, 館 can be broken into 食 and 官. So you count the number of brush/pen strokes it would take to write that character, look it up by that number, then find that component (called a “radical”), and then find the character you’re looking for (possibly by further looking under the total number of strokes to find a character). Once you find the character that matches, flip to the page number that describes that character.

So, we’ve found the page holding the description of the meaning for (say) 行, and its pronunciation. Except there’s not one pronunciation: there are several. Fortunately, in the case of 行, it’s followed by a string of hiragana which, after even a small amount of training, a student will quickly recognize as the final portion of a verb. The list of possible readings for 行 will include various verbs that start with that character, and an indication of what characters would be expected to follow it when performing its function as a verb. Verbs, whether written with initial kanji or not, will virtually always be followed by a string of hiragana which indicate how the verb is being conjugated, and usually indicate which reading the kanji itself has (if one is already familiar with the character, of course). You’ll determine that in this case it should be read simply as the “i” in “ikimashouka?”, which means “shall we go?”.

The 行 had hiragana to help indicate its reading (when filling this role, they are called “okurigana”). No such luck with the others. If I look up 明, I see 14 possible readings, and 10 different verbs/adjectives it could form part of (depending on the okurigana that follows it, and fortunately most of them have the same reading for 明). I can rule out the ones that require okurigana, because there isn’t any in this case. And the remaining readings can be divided into two groups, one group that is used mainly when the character appears as its own separate word, and another that is used mainly when the character appears in combination with other kanji to form a compound word (but there are no guarantees). Since it appears with other characters, it’s reasonable to assume they form some sort of compound, and fortunately the group of readings more commonly used for compounds comprises just 3 of the 14. Ideally, the compound I’m looking for will appear in the list of common compound words that will appear on that page of my kanji dictionary: then I will have identified not only the correct reading for this character, but for the remaining characters in the word, too. Otherwise, I’ll most likely need to look up the next character the same way I did the first, find its list of possible readings, and try looking up various possible reading combinations between the two characters in my Japanese dictionary (the one for looking up words, and not kanji).

Alas! In this particular case, none of the possible readings of 明 are correct here! 明日 is a relatively special case where two characters join together to form a word which is pronounced based on the characters’ combined meaning, rather than their individual readings. Unless it was listed as one of the example compounds (fortunately, this is likely), I would probably have a very, very hard time discovering that the word is “ashita”, which means “tomorrow”. Fortunately, even without knowing this, I probably would have settled on the alternative reading “myōnichi”, which is a legitimate reading of the characters 明日, and also means “tomorrow”, but combines the actual readings of the characters, making it possible to find using the dictionary approach. It wouldn’t be wrong, and I’d be able to continue reading from that point—even understanding the correct meaning—but “myōnichi” is a very formal word, and I’d sound pretty funny to any Japanese person that would hear me use that word in the middle of a relatively casual sentence. There’s even one more possible reading of 明日 (still with the same meaning): “asu”!

Perhaps you’ve noticed at this point that I’ve now said 明日 is a single word. Of course, it’s a word that appears in a sea of kanji: 明日図書館. How the hell are you supposed to figure out where one word ends and another begins? The answer: brute force. If, when trying to look up what word might be formed from 明 and 日, you see that there’s a word 明日, well then the next kanji might start a new word, so you react accordingly. (The remaining characters turn out to form the word for “library”; the meaning of the full sentence was: “Shall we go to the library tomorrow?”.)

Of course, it’ll suck if it turns out that there’s another word that continues with that kanji… the other day, someone on a Japanese-language IRC channel wrote “今日本語を勉強しています”, which means “I’m studying Japanese now”. But there’s a bit of ambiguity in the start of the sentence: 今 is the word for “now”, and 日本語 is the word for “Japanese language”. But 今日 is a word meaning “today”, and 本 by itself means “book”: “今日本を読みました” would mean “I read a book today.” Notice that the first three characters (kanji) of both sentences are the same, even though they have no words in common (not counting the particle “word” を). You don’t know whether the first couple of words are “today, book” or “now, Japanese” (obviously, the word order is completely different from that of English), until you reach the character 語. If you’d never seen any of these characters before, and were looking each of them up individually, it might take you quite a while to figure out what was written if you first started down the track of 今日 being the first word, and trying to figure out what word might be formed by 本語, only eventually discovering your mistake after an hour or so of banging your head against the table! A well-placed comma will go a long way in such a case, but by now I think you’ve got a very good picture as to why learning Japanese through reading it, has the potential to shorten your lifespan.

As you saw with 明日, “ashita/asu/myōnichi”, a given string of kanji can sometimes have multiple possible readings. This is not particularly uncommon. However, sometimes a string of kanji can not only have multiple readings, but those readings can actually have different meanings! Take 見物, which can be read either as “kenbutsu/to go sightseeing”, or as “mimono/thing worth seeing”. Only the surrounding context can make it clear which is meant. (In practice, 見物 is a rarer reading, and a writer might choose to write 物 in kana instead, to alleviate any ambiguity.)

When I sit down to make an attempt at reading a Japanese book, I’ll often end up with several other books nearby to help me do so. There’s the actual book I’m trying to read, the kanji dictionary for looking up unfamiliar characters, and the vocabulary dictionary. I’ll also often have a secondary kanji book that is less useful for discovering what a character is, but more helpful for providing advice and information on how to remember the character. And, I might even have another book or two to look up points of grammar that I’m having trouble grasping.

As I read a passage, I look up my characters, possibly look them up again for tips on what the individual components might mean, look up unfamiliar words, and if necessary look up an unusual verb or adjective use. I can easily spend twenty minutes, maybe even up to an hour, on a single sentence. These days I try to rely more on electronic dictionaries, which save both time and disk space, but the process remains largely tedious. As I learn more characters, vocabulary and grammar, each additional passage takes me less time, but it can still be an ordeal.

But, after mastering reading and gorging myself on Japanese literature, will I finally have gained an intimate familiarity with the language that I can take and apply directly in using the spoken language in conversation? Well… yes and no. Obviously, Japanese is Japanese, and a lot of phrases I get from books can go straight into conversations too. But, the usual style of written Japanese is still significantly different in tone, level of formality, etc, from spoken Japanese. Nobody speaks the way a typical Japanese book reads, except maybe radio announcers and other people who aren’t actually speaking to a particular person. If you spoke sentences you’d gotten from a book, in many cases you’d sound like you were quoting (which, of course, you would be). Fortunately, reading (modern) novels means that you may pick up some actual conversations in the form of dialog, and manga (Japanese graphic novels) are a popular way of learning the colloquial language—but note that both of these can often depict very casual conversation styles that would be considered quite rude if you employed them in conversation outside of family and close friends.

Wrapping things up

I was going to follow this section up with some ideas about learning Japanese vocabulary and kanji efficiently; but after working on that for a while, I’ve decided that the ideas are still too immature to put here yet. Meanwhile, I think I’ll write an article that talks about my favorite Japanese-learning resources instead, and where they still manage to fall frustratingly short, and what I think the perfect Japanese course might look like. Probably, some of the ideas I had for efficient learning will seep into that article.

I’ve always been fascinated by the study of foreign languages. This fascination probably sprang from a childhood love of codes and ciphers. The languages I was most fascinated with were those with beautiful and exotic writing systems. If I had encountered Devanagārī before Japanese, perhaps that would have become the primary object of my dedicated language studies.

I was 11 years old, trying to learn to write in Russian, when my buddy Laban showed me some Japanese characters he’d been learning—the Hiragana (ひらがな). These characters have a simple, graceful beauty to them; from that moment I was hooked.

My buddy and I learned the two sound-based, syllabic writing systems, Hiragana and Katakana (カタカナ), and had good fun doing so. We even incorporated them into the ciphers we’d use to write letters to each other.

The funny thing is, we both learned both writing systems, without actually knowing a lick of Japanese—so we had little to write in it, apart from Japanized English. It didn’t take us long to decide that we really wanted to start learning the language to go with the writing. We both tried starting from library books, but quickly switched to some weekly classes that were being taught on Saturdays at a Japanese Buddhist church. I later took several classes at CSU Sacramento, and beyond that, both of us have been struggling off and on to continue our study of the language over the last twenty years.

Now, obviously, during the twenty years that have passed, there has not been twenty years’ worth of work put in. Nevertheless, I definitely would have hoped to be further along at this point than I am. In particular, it frustrates me that I can’t pick up a book, newspaper or magazine and just start reading along, stopping briefly every so often to look up a word. An explanation for how this is possible is the focus of part two of this article.

I’ve recently entered into another spurt of Japanese study, and I am happily finding that I am making significantly more progress this time than I have in the past. Partly because I’m motivated by the growing realization that I’ve spent so much time on this language, but am still as yet unable to put it to reasonable use: I would like to put enough additional investment into it to avoid all my past effort having been little more than wasted time. And also partly because I’m beginning to understand what sorts of techniques have the best effects for me, and am learning to avoid the sorts of practices that have in the past caused me to burn out, and set aside studying for large spaces of time.

Grammar and Pronunciation

Thankfully, neither Japanese grammar nor its pronunciation are particularly difficult. Japanese pronunciation has sometimes been compared to Spanish (though there are of course some important differences), and the structure of the language is controlled by a set of rules which, though very different from English, are at least consistently followed, so that you are not required to memorize a plethora of exceptions (as you might find necessary if you were learning English as a second language). In fact, if you do not intend to learn anything beyond actually speaking and comprehending spoken Japanese, you might find it to be much easier to learn than some Western languages.

For one thing, it lacks the concept of “gendered nouns”, that many Western languages have (but not English), requiring English learners to memorize the apparently random words that must be prefaced with (e.g.) “la” and “las” instead of “el” and “los”. In fact, Japanese doesn’t even have a word for “the” or “a”.

Japanese also nearly lacks plural forms—that is, Japanese does have a couple different ways to express plurality, but they are generally only used when there is a reason to stress the fact that we’re talking about more than one. The Japanese word “hon” could mean any of “a book”, “the book”, “the books”, “some books”, or “books”.

Some Asian languages, such as Chinese and Thai, distinguish meaning via the use of variously pitched tones. A rising, falling, or stationary high or low pitch can seriously change the meanings of words. Fortunately, Japanese has no such thing—or almost none; pitch is very occasionally crucial for distinguishing one word from another, but it is rare for a textbook to explain these, and virtually unheard-of for a dictionary to include them.

Japanese’s Three Writing Systems

Japanese is written using three distinct writing systems. There are the two syllabaries I’ve already mentioned, and an additional form called “kanji”. The kanji are characters that come directly from Chinese (though there are a few characters that were invented in Japan), and in fact “kanji” means “Chinese characters”. Kanji are used primarily for two things: to write Japanese words that were taken from Chinese, and to represent the meaning behind many Japanese words. The “hiragana” syllabic system is used to fill in the gaps, serving the purpose of allowing Japanese grammar to flow around Chinese ideographs. The “katakana” syllabic system is mainly used to represent foreign words and non-word sounds, and also to provide emphasis.

As an example of how hiragana is used together with the kanji, take the Chinese character for “come”: 来. But when used as a verb, especially as the primary verb in a sentence, it won’t usually be used to express the verb “to come” by itself: it needs to be accompanied by some hiragana characters to indicate the tense of the verb—and even how you should pronounce the character 来. If you want to say, “I will come”, you might write “kimasu” 来ます; if you want to say, “I have come”, you might instead write “kimashita” 来ました. The character 来 provides the initial “ki” sound, and the rest must be written using hiragana characters. (Note: the pronoun “I” is ommitted in the Japanese examples, and isn’t necessary for these complete sentences, which could also have been translated as “she will come”, and “it came”, etc, depending on the surrounding context.)

The two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana (together known as the “kana”), each have 46 basic forms used in modern Japanese, and modified versions of these forms are used to represent another fifty sounds or so. In contrast, there are several thousands of kanji characters. Students in Japan are expected to know some two thousand kanji by the time they’ve finished high school.

A natural question might occur to you: why are kanji even necessary, given how daunting a task it is to learn them, and that there are two complete syllabic writing systems, either of which could be used by themselves to write any Japanese phrase without resorting to kanji? For instance, take the following sentence:

After eating dinner, I found I was tired, and so decided to go to bed instead of going to see a movie.

As you can see, the second line, which is written entirely in hiragana and is perfectly comprehensible to a Japanese reader (barring any mistakes I may have made in writing it), is a whopping five characters longer than the first line, which uses eleven kanji, most of which are quite a bit more complex than any hiragana. If I had written these using a pen (or a brush), the first line could possibly have taken nearly twice as long to write! So why bother with them at all?

Well, probably the main justification is that this is simply how the written language happened to evolve. Of course, that’s hardly consolation, and it’s far from the whole story. After World War II, the government made some fairly extensive changes to the written language, simplifying the use of kana, and restricting the number of kanji required to be a literate reader of the language. If they could do these things, they could probably have eliminated the kanji altogether; but they did not. As you’ll see shortly, there are good reasons not to use kana alone, but surely something else would have been more expedient… though in losing the kanji altogether it would inescapably have lost much of its beauty as well.

But the kanji aren’t useless, either. The Japanese language is filled with more than its fair share of homonyms; which can easily lead to confusion. Remember “kimasu” 来ます? But “kimasu” can mean “I will wear” as well as “I will come”. In the vast majority of cases, context will make it quite clear which is meant; but when reading, the judicial use of kanji will eliminate all doubt: the one meaning “will wear” is written 着ます.

An extreme (and famous) example:

李も桃も桃の内。

すもももももももものうち。

sumomo mo momo mo momo no uchi.

Both the plum and the peach are members of the prunus family. (Literally: Both plum and peach are within “peach”.)

The second line, written only with hiragana, is unreadable. As you can see, written Japanese does not use spaces to separate words (though these may be used in romanized Japanese, as in the third line). The word “momo” appears twice, the word “sumomo” once at the beginning, and between these are a couple of small words “mo”, which are called particles, and serve a grammatical purpose (the “both … and …”). Someone speaking this phrase out loud could easily distinguish the words and particles from each other with the use of inflection and light pauses; but as a string of hiragana characters all you see is a sea of も (“mo”).

Kanji comes to save the day! The top line uses kanji very effectively to distinguish one word from another. “SUMOMOmoMOMOmoMOMOnoUCHI”, where each string of capital letters is a single word written in kanji. It’s very easy to pick them apart now!

A Foreign Mode of Thought

Another obstacle to learn Japanese, is the fact that not only isn’t it very similar to English and other Western languages, but it isn’t really very similar to even the way we tend to think about things.

Take for instance the phrase, “I like sports”. In Japanese this might be expressed as “watashi wa supootsu ga suki desu” (the “oo” in “supootsu” is not pronounced like “boot”, but as a long o sound “oh”, which makes “supootsu” a tolerable approximation of the English word “sports”, especially since both u’s are actually silent/whispered). “Mary likes Jon” could be “Meari wa Jon ga suki desu”. In the first few lessons of a typical Japanese textbook, a student will usually learn that “A likes B” is given as “A wa B ga suki desu” in Japanese. Unfortunately, this is a simplification of the truth.

The truth is, a Japanese sentence tends to rely very heavily on its context. “A wa B ga suki desu” doesn’t quite mean that A likes B… in some cases, it can actually mean B likes A. I was recently chatting on IRC with someone, and she said (in English) that she likes “Pocky” (a popular Japanese sweet). My response in Japanese was “Pocky wa nihon no minna-san ga suki desu”. In this case, the meaning is “Everyone in Japan (nihon no minna-san) likes Pocky”; not “Pocky likes everyone in Japan”!

Well, if “A wa B ga suki desu” can mean either one of “A likes B” or “B likes A”, then how can you know when it means one and when the other? The answer is that it doesn’t really mean either one, but something else entirely that doesn’t map all that cleanly onto English modes of thought. How to translate it into something that makes sense to an English speaker depends heavily on what else had been said before it!

“A wa” means something like “as for A”, or “speaking of A”; it marks “A” as “the thing I’m going to say something about now”, and implies that the actual interesting part of the sentence is the rest of it (whatever follows the “wa”). The particle “ga” marks the word or phrase before it as being the grammatical subject of the sentence, and “suki” means something similar to “likeable” except that it doesn’t entirely make clear whether the subject is the sentence is the thing liked (the typical situation), or the thing that does the liking (the case in my Pocky sentence). So, “Watashi wa supootsu ga suki desu” really means something like, “Speaking of myself, sports (are) likeable”. The “watashi wa” bit says, “I’m speaking of myself, but ‘myself’ is not the interesting thing I’m saying: the interesting part of the sentence is that I like sports.”

Without surrounding context, “Minna-san wa Pocky ga suki desu” can mean what most people are taught to think it means: “Everyone likes Pocky”. However, its implication is that the thing we’re talking about isn’t Pocky, it’s everyone. It makes a great answer to a question such as “What kind of thing is loved by everyone?”, because in that case, the interesting part is “what kind of thing”, and not “everyone”, which is only the topic of conversation (the interesting thing is what you have to say about the conversation’s topic). But in most cases that you want to say “everyone loves Pocky”, you’re not talking aobut everyone, you’re talking about Pocky. The interesting part of the sentence is what you have to say about Pocky, so Pocky gets the “wa” after it, and the “ga” goes after “everyone”. “Pocky wa Minna-san ga suki desu.”

This is an extremely difficult concept for many Westerners to grasp about Japanese. Unfortunately, it’s also a very important concept: the Japanese language demands the use of “wa” and “ga”, and knowing when to use which, all the time. The concept is sufficiently complex that there are whole chapters, and even whole books, written on just the subject of how “wa” should (and shouldn’t) be used.

A somewhat similar example would be the Japanese phrase “mita hito” (見た人), which could mean either “the person who saw (it)”, or “the person who was seen/the person whom I (or someone else) saw”. In Japanese, to modify a noun by a phrase you simply drop the phrase right before the noun: “saw-person”. This makes it pretty clear what is being modified, but it doesn’t provide any clues as to whether the modified noun is the subject or the object of the modifying phrase. The astonishing thing, though, is that it generally doesn’t need to: since you never say either “the person who saw it” or “the person I saw” without having already been talking about somebody having seen something, in actual use you would never be without the context that explains which is meant. So there isn’t actually any need to distinguish between them: if the previous sentence was “I spied an old friend when I went to the store today”, then the meaning of “saw-person” in a following sentence, “The ‘saw-person’ was Tommy Jenkins” is obvious. Similarly, if the previous sentence had been “I think somebody saw you when you were chewing out Susan”, then “saw-person” in a following sentence would be in reference to whoever witnessed the scolding.

Of course, when context is insufficient or missing, then one can resolve ambiguity by rephrasing or clarifying. There’s nothing wrong with saying “sono koto o mita hito” (the person who saw that taking place) or “watashi no mita hito” (the person that I saw) when the need arises; it’s just that such phrases are fairly rare, precisely because they’re unnecessary when context provides enough information for us to know which was meant, without explicitly saying. Similarly, if by “Mary wa Jon ga suki desu” we mean that Jon likes Mary rather than the reverse, and the context doesn’t clarify this, we can explicitly say “Mary is liked by Jon”: “Mary wa Jon ni suki desu”.

Note: so far, the best explanation of wa versus ga that I’ve read, is in Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You by Jay Rubin; but I also feel that he makes some fairly extreme statements. In particular, I think his explanation could tend to scare someone off from using “wa”, and that despite his attempts to say otherwise, the reader is left with the general feeling that “wa” should only be used in special circumstances, which is far from the case. In the end, the best way to understand wa is to be exposed to a lot of Japanese sentences where it is used (and practice making your own), to find good textbooks that give useful explanations of how it affects emphasis and meaning, and to avoid grossly oversimplified descriptions such as it being the equivalent to English “the”, or expressing the real gramattical subject in intransitive verbs.